


The Flower must not blame the Bee

by middlemarch



Category: Mercy Street (TV)
Genre: America Civil War, Chess, Chess Metaphors, F/M, Female Friendship, Friendship, Gen, Romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-09-27
Updated: 2016-09-27
Packaged: 2018-08-18 04:46:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,139
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8149552
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/middlemarch/pseuds/middlemarch
Summary: A gambit, the endgame.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [ultrahotpink](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ultrahotpink/gifts).



“You embarrassed me tonight,” he said evenly. 

Mary hadn’t expected him to speak, he could see that, and she was startled, still, as he imagined a doe might be, caught by a hunter in a snowy wood. Henry had bid them both goodnight a quarter hour earlier and she had set aside her mending for her book as the chaplain walked from the room. Jed hadn’t paid attention and wasn’t sure if it was German poetry or mathematics, both apparently her guilty pleasures. He couldn’t quite understand why she wished to conceal her interest, but he couldn’t remember any female relative who was as fond of reading as Mary was and he’d never met a woman educated beyond simple figuring, jusr what was necessary for dress-making and keeping the household accounts. Perhaps it was only that Mary’s predilections were unusual and that to be unusual was to attract notice, something she had learned she did not care for or which carried a burden he couldn’t imagine. He would ask her but he could not, not after what he had said. She was very lovely in the half-light of the evening and he could convince himself they sat in their private sitting room, dutiful servants and not orderlies making the faint noise that breached the heavy library door. He waited to hear how she would respond.

“Why, Jedediah, I don’t know what you mean,” she replied and he could hear the effort she made not to sound flustered.

“I think you do, Mary. I think you know quite well.”

“Not over a game? Surely not! Not because of…a chess match?”

“Am I not allowed my wounded pride? To be so clearly your inferior… and before Henry?” Jed smiled to show that he was not deeply distressed; indeed the occasion was, at its most basic level, nearly entirely amusing. Nearly.

He and Henry had been challenging each other across a chess board for weeks now. Jed preferred the ivory and Henry was willing to allow him to choose. The games were spirited at times, with not infrequent shouts of victory when the hour was late and a gambit successful, and other times leisurely endeavors where it seemed neither man was intent on winning, but only on moving the pieces about so that the conversation could flow more easily, the rhythm of the play mirroring the friendly chat. They left the board and the pieces on a rosewood table and without any discussion, the other staff were careful to avoid jostling it, though Mary had had to remind Hale once or twice, in a soft, firm voice that brooked no dissent. It was an elegant set, the queen with a delicately fluted crown and a pattern of tiny stars carved into her skirt, the crenellations on the rook sharply cut but with a satin finish. 

The second set, the one that Mary played on with Matron Brannan, was not so fine. The board was the work of young Isaac Watts, the black squares stained with walnut juice, and the pieces were rougher, without details other than those needed to assign roles, which were pawns and which bishops, serviceable rather than artful, never the set that Mr. Green would have left out for his hotel guests to use. Jed wasn’t sure of the provenance of either, but knew the second had a ruder heritage. The women never complained and never asked to use the set he and Henry had taken ownership of without so much as a by-your-leave. He was not sure just when the Head Nurse and the hospital’s Matron had begun their own tournament but he enjoyed seeing the progress when they left any evidence to be seen; they did not linger so over their games and at least half the time, the pieces had been neatly stowed in a cigar box, its lid promising Cuba’s exotic clime, once rosy frangipani or hibiscus faded with much handling.

The women’s games were different in more than one respect. There were gambits he did not recognize, strategy he could not quite grasp, though he told himself it was only that he could not see all the plays consecutively. On the rare occasions Mary and Matron sat at their match when he and Henry played, he listened with one ear, heard what passed for conversation between them, which was scant and pointed; Mary hummed under her breath at times and Matron had the swiftness of a cobra strike when she moved a piece and he could not always tell if her exclamations were a comment on the match or her struggle with a persistent catarrh he would have worried over in someone who did not so clearly have the constitution of an ox. One night had been a particular entertainment, as Hale approached and tried to advise; Mary made a few deferential comments designed to simultaneously satisfy and bore Hale but Matron was having none of it and guffawed until she shouted, “Be off with ye, ye great, addle-pated numbskull! Ye fustilarian! Cards is all yer fit for and even there, yer likely to be fleeced! Go on, find Nan, she’s the patience for yer infernal mumbling, not I!” and Jed had looked away, anywhere, rather than risk shaming Hale with his regard or bursting into laughter should he catch Mary’s eye. Henry found the edge of the table as fascinating as Darwin’s Origins, for the time it took for Hale to walk from the room, the cowed man murmuring something about a patient, paperwork, Nurse Hastings’s most polite request he join her…Jed felt slightly less dismay about Hale’s dressing-down after his last comment, and more nausea at the image of the two, Hale and Hastings, engaged in simultaneous amorous entanglement and machination. Whatever impulse Jed had had to leave his own match and go to watch Mary and Matron had been squelched by Matron’s robust and scathing eruption and he’d settled back to a predictable game, Henry the victor this time.

Hale had made himself scarce whenever the chess boards were out following that encounter and Jed blessed Matron for providing him surcease from the man’s pedantic twaddle. It had been a very pleasant evening tonight, a more satisfactory dinner than usual as Mary had instructed the cook to do something a bit different to the ever-present mutton, a braise and some herb perhaps, the air in the room fragrant with pipe-smoke and the fire merry in the hearth. He and Henry had been enjoying an unhurried game, almost more a dance than a battle, and Jed had been regarding the board with a relaxed eye when Mary came to them with coffee on a tray, waiting patiently for him to move a piece so that she might set down the cups. He hadn’t a clear idea of that he wanted to do other than needle her a bit, no strategy that would lead to success apparent on the chess board, so he simply looked at the field of figures, wondering which piece he might shift and what it might yield, besides the delicious, growing tension of Mary beside him.

“Shall I serve your coffee then and let you play in peace?” she’d said after waiting a few minutes. He’d felt even more urge to ruffle her feathers at her mild, almost doting tone and had made no response. He could sense her frustration building and thought if he’d looked in her face, he’d see the rising color in her cheeks, a little furrow in her forehead as she drew her eyebrows together in a moué of annoyance. A minute passed, then another.

“Oh, for Heaven’s sake! Play pawn f3 e5 then g4 Queen h4. Checkmate. Now, drink your coffee before it gets cold and goes to waste!” Mary exclaimed, putting the cup down more forcefully than he’d expected, though not quite enough to slop the contents over the side. She whirled away and he flushed.

“Ha! Fool’s mate. Suits you, Dr. Foster!” Matron called from across the room and then laughed throatily, a younger woman’s mocking laugh he recalled from his youth, from smoky salons in Paris and Baltimore ballrooms. He’d not noticed she’d come into the room, had had eyes only for the chess board and Mary. Henry had been kind and sipped at his coffee for a few minutes before offering,

“I’ve some work to attend to, want to look in on Ross and my sermon won’t write itself. Good night, Foster.” Jed had nodded, given his friend a quick smile to show he was not so very distressed, and went back to studying the board and considering Mary. She’d settled herself on the sofa where she’d left a basket of mending and had her head bent over her sewing, her eyes hidden.

Matron had walked over to where he sat and looked at the board and him, chuckling again. She spoke in a lower voice, for only Jed to hear her.

“’Tis a tricky game, chess, respects the intellect more’n most. Ye shan’t trouble yerself over it, she’s the mind for it and aren’t we all the better for it, eh? How else does the place still stand, with Nan’s temper fierce enough to take off the very roof? Still, ye might try to learn something, might make a change for ye to be the student and won’t they, she and young Henry both, think more of ye for it?”

She’d cuffed him on the shoulder lightly and left then, a broad smile on her face. If she were a man, he suspected she’d be whistling. He’d nursed his coffee and admired Mary as she sat; once she lay down the mending and took up her book, she’d been so engrossed he could stare at her without any consequence, observe the way she kept tucking one stray curl behind her ear. He’d walked over to sit across from her without her notice, had interrupted her with his comment.

“I think you are overstating things, to suggest I am your superior. I’ll admit, my patience was wearing thin and I spoke out of turn. Perhaps you had another strategy in mind,” she said.

“I can’t say I had any gambit I wished to play. And nothing as impressive as what you suggested. And you can’t deny, Matron rendered judgment quite succinctly. It seems I should observe your games,” he replied, honest and enjoying the unexpected ability to be humble before her without any particular shame. She did not find it so easy.

“It’s, we only play ladies’ chess, I shouldn’t think it’s worth your attention,” she said.

“I wasn’t aware the pieces could tell the difference of the player. And I think anyone who can get to check in two moves is worthy of my attention. I hadn’t known you were so expert,” he remarked.

“It’s not like that, I only like to play a little and Matron is a very fine opponent. And a teacher, for all that she can be rather… gruff.”

“Mary, I began this by teasing and I’ve been served my just desserts. I ought to have been embarrassed—by the poor skill I displayed in the game and by my behavior to you. You needn’t be troubled by any of it. I expect Henry will delight in chaffing me over it but he’s been so grim lately, it’ll be good for him, and I should learn better manners, no? And to appreciate my coffee. Though I’d like to know—just how many other endgames did you imagine? If the coffee hadn’t been waiting?”

“Well, I am still sorry but if you are not terribly unhappy, we’ll let it rest. And as to your question about the game, I think there were probably at least seven alternatives. Matron might have made out more, that’s all I saw. You might have tried Philidor’s Legacy or Anastasia’s mate. Or Queen’s mate, but they all would have taken longer,” she said, mollified more by the intellectual question than his admission of his own faults.

“I should have at least considered Queen’s mate, but I suppose I am the fool Matron makes me out to be,” he said, adding, “I am very particular about my queen.” Would she take his meaning? And if she did, what gambit would she use?

“Yes. I’ve noticed that. For my part, I prefer to end the game with a bare king,” she replied, letting her eyes flicker to his, the wit a convenient camouflage for what was beneath, something softer, yearning and entirely endearing, that gentle, implacable candor that lacking in himself, he cherished in her, he cherished as it was more Mary than her dark eyes or her deft hands.

“ _Servat regina colorem_ , Baroness.”

“Check,” she replied and the game ended, the smile in her eyes and not on her lips.

**Author's Note:**

> This was a prompt response for ultrahotpink. I apologize for any mishaps with the chess-- I don't play myself but I love to use it in stories. In my fanon, Matron is the best player of the bunch. "Ye fustilarian!" is an insult from Shakespeare. The actual gambits I reference I have researched and there really is an endgame called "bare king." _Servat regina colorem_ means "queen gets her color" and is an expression from chess I used to my own purposes.
> 
> The title is from Emily Dickinson.


End file.
